RomblonWriter

We fled from Mindanao in search of peace, but it seems trouble has been following us.

Datu Al Utto, a Moro refugee in Manila.

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Facing a new war

The staccato sounds of gunfire echoes fresh in his memory as her recalled the day his family fled from the hinterland village of Benisila in North Cotabato when the Muslim rebellion in the southern Philippines broke out in 1972.

Datu Al Utto was five years old then but he recalls vividly his family’s hurried flight on two helicopters to escape the war that killed more than 50,000 people, mostly civilians, in two decades.

“I wasn’t going to school yet, but I still remember the day we fled, including the bursts of gunfire. Two helicopters took us,” says Utto, now 28, in his heavy southerner’s accent.

His memory of the war ended as soon as the choppers took off for Cotabato City where his family settled. It was a flight that could have broken his father’s heart as they left behind a vast track of ancestral lands, seven carabaos and a farm truck.

On another side of the province, the family of four-year-old Mariam Usman fled Cadungan in the municipality of Talayan, shortly after his father, who was jailed by the military on suspicion that he was a rebel, was freed from a three-month detention and her grandmother was killed in a military bombing.

Like the Uttos, the Usmans settled in Cotabato City.

In 1998, Mariam asked her parents to allow her to work overseas. She found a job as a maid in Saudi Arabia until 1989 when she met Utto while visiting her uncle at the Quaipo Islamic center in Manila. The meeting led to marriage in less than a week of whirlwind courtship.

“It was December 17, five days after his arrival. He was also on vacation from Saudi Arabia. We got married on December 21,” Miriam reminisced.

When the couple settled in the slums of Quiapo, they started seeing the poignant side of life in the city. Without a college diploma “because I was too hardheaded” to listen to his parents’ advice to finish his studies, Utto found out how difficult it was to look for employment in Manila.

“It’s hard to look for a job here when you are a Muslim, especially if you have no degree. No company is willing to take you,” complained Utto, who dropped out from a course in civil engineering.

“If you are a Muslim, the impression of people here is that you are malevolent. People here seem to have equated Muslims with everything bad. It’s too unfair, that’s why many Muslims adopt Christian names.”

The couple’s odyssey is a familiar story among Muslims who came to Manila to escape the ravages of war in Mindanao – many of them married fellow refugees to start their own lives, fight another kind of war in the city’s street jungles.

The Uttos who were among the 25 squatter families relocated from Quiapo to Tagig following the government’s campaign to clear the city’s shanty towns, started to build their lives by washing bottles for a factory in Baesa, Quezon City, just to survive.

Two years later, Utto found a better-paying job as a liaison officer of an overseas job-placement agency to be able to save for the future, at a time when they had been blessed with a one-year-old daughter. But not long after they started to enjoy a new life, police came to demolish their shanty in Quaipo early this month.

“We fled from Mindanao in search of peace, but it seems trouble has been following us,” said Utto, who was building their new home at the back of a village mosque in Tagig while being interviewed.

“We are not angry but there’s this feeling of helplessness, a feeling of uncertainty once again after our home in Quiapo was torn down.”

The family of Guilermo Bautista, who works at the Court of Appeals in Manila, shared Utto’s trepidation. Losing a sari-sari store and a house – two rooms of which they rented out at P800 monthly each for an extra income – the family feels at a loss on how to start life once again.

“It’s hard to start anew, but we have to face life,” said Fatima, Guilermo’s wife, cuddling their nine-month-old daughter in her arms.

With her husband’s P4, 500 monthly salary, Fatima could not figure out how to make both ends meet, now that her husband also has to spend more for his fare in going to his office.

The Uttos and the Bautistas were among 50 of the 250 relocated families which have to pitch tents in an open space because the two buildings where the squatters were supposed to move in have only 200 rooms.

“We hope that the authorities won’t leave us until we can stand on our own,” said Fatima, adding that they were promised to be given a room of their own in another building.

On the pathway to the mosque, some children of the relocated squatters played, unmindful of their life in exile in their own country.

Today, 23 January 1996